Fiji Cruising
Vega
Hugh and Annie
Sat 23 Jun 2018 04:46
I may have mentioned this before, but sailing around the world makes us realise just how much we love our life at home. It also makes us feel very remote when events happen at home that we cannot participate in directly.
Yesterday we heard that my father, aged 95, and who is living in a care home in Bristol, is deteriorating and now needs full time nursing care. I am lucky that my two brothers are there to sort out the arrangements but I feel I need a period at home to spend time with him. At the same time I had a message to say that my old friend Ben had complications after what should have been a straightforward operation. It turns out that things weren’t quite as bad as I had initially feared - although pretty unpleasant for Ben!
On each of our legs up until this point every new island has been a step nearer to the half way point of NZ. Now that we are in Fiji we are doing what many people do and that is to spend enough time here to see what is a surprisingly large island group. After our long stay in NZ we have temporarily lost the feeling that we are now on the home run. Now, I don’t expect sympathy for feeling homesick in the island paradise that is Fiji but it does bring into focus the fact that it is the journey that has made us appreciate life at home (barring the politics) more than we had initially anticipated. Spending time in fabulous locations seems less important than being with family and friends. We are therefore reviewing this leg of the trip and will plan a passage that gets us home again in late September or early October rather than the end of October as previously planned.
Next year should be different and although we are looking forward to Vanuatu in a few weeks time it is the trip up through Indonesia to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand that really excites me. Not only exotic places but good progress to the west. Thailand will be much easier for people to visit us and after that across to Sri Lanka and the Maldives from where we will decide how best to get home. If the Red Sea is an option again that may well be our route up into the Mediterranean rather than the Indian Ocean to Capetown, Brazil and the Caribbean.
In the meantime we console ourselves with scuba diving, trips ashore and hunkering down in the wind and rain! The new scuba gear has proved a great success with perfect buoyancy control and ease of use. Our first attempt with the gear was a mixed bag as our dinghy proved a bit small for sorting everything out in the choppy conditions. Annie made it into the water (with Rick as Buddy) while I stayed behind and watched large manta rays swim around the dinghy. The second attempt was from a local, much larger, boat with six other divers and we all had a great time looking at the corals, anemones, clown fish and shoals of other brightly coloured fish. Our air tanks have a greater volume than those likely to be used with a dive operator and we came up with a lot of air remaining.
The other low point of the first dive was finding that our dinghy would still not plane, even with the new engine. Increasing the throttle just resulted in boiling foamy water around the transom and little forward movement. We had one further small adjustment that could be made to alter the vertical tilt of the motor on the transom. This we did. Only a few millimetres but, whey hey, what a difference!! With the two of us perched up at the front we now skim across the water like a supercharged flat pebble. We just have to remember to get our weight further back when de-accelerating to avoid the bow wave coming over and into the dinghy!